On 4 May 2006, at 15:29, Dr. Drang wrote:
You should ask Fletcher Penney; my experience is that he would be happy to explain his reasoning.
And here what Fletcher said:
Question:
## What is the reason that meta data keys cannot contain underscores "_" (or dashes "-"), but blanks?
Hence
table_of_contents: yes => invalid table-of-contents: yes => invalid table of contents: yes => valid
I realize that the MultiMarkdown script is coded this way (_ParseMetaData) -- my question is if there's a specific reason to do this (eg. related to XML, even though, AFAIK, at least dashes are valid in XML)?
Would you consider making these special characters valid as well?
Fletcher's answer:
It was not done for any particular reason - they will be added in next release, but for now, just swap out the code below in _ParseMetaData:
if ($inMetaData) { if ($line =~ /^([a-zA-Z0-9][0-9a-zA-Z _-]+?):\s*(.*)$/ ) {
Then, I also asked:
## Currently, definition lists are not supported, ie. the XHTML
<dl> <dt>Term 1</dt> <dd>Definition 1</dd> <dt>Term 2</dt> <dd>Definition 2</dd> </dl>
thing. Would you ever consider to add this to MultiMarkdown? In "stx2any" it's defined like this:
term 1:: definition1
term 2:: definition 2
to get the above XHTML-like result, which is quite useful.
Fletcher's answer:
This is something that I will wait on the "real" Markdown to support before I add it to MultiMarkdown. I don't have a lot of need for it, and there hasn't seemed to be real agreement on a syntax from the mailing list in the past.
With regards - Stefan